Write a better Wikinut summary

The article summary is your big chance to sell your page. So how do you write a tantalising summary and ensure your article gets the audience it deserves? We give you some simple tips, and work through an real-world example.

Be a tease

Think of your summary as a film trailor, a sneak preview, a cliffhanger. It should draw in your reader and leave them wanting more. Flirt with them by giving hints and glimpes of the content; outline the article, without ever revealing all.

Summaries are shown on a category pages, search results, tag pages - basically anywhere that puts your article in front of a potential reader. So in the nicest way possible way your summary will be competing with those written by other authors.

Keep it snappy

Remember, this is just a summary so don't feel you need to rewrite your whole article. You should aim for around 30 words - too few and it may look incomplete, too long and it will become harder to read.

An article summary example

Let's pretend we have written an article about a holiday in Paris. We've reviewed our hotel, who told us about a lovely antique market and a less-visited gallery, and raved about a great restaurant that our taxi driver recommended. Ok, so we could start with:

Read about our stay at the Dormir Hôtel in Paris, where we spent a day searching for antiques, visted the Orel Art Gallery and ate in a delightful restaurant.

This is an Ok start, but fairly mundane. There is no real theme to the summary, it is more a list of what we did. It doesn't really entice anybody to read more. How about we try to focus on the local/off-the-beaten-track angle of our trip - after all, we've avoided the usual big sights.

Paris the local way - a weekend of antique street markets, the lesser known Orel Art Gallery and a superb Parisan restaurant.

This is now more like it. We know have a common thread through the summary. But let's try to inject some more emotion into the text:

A Paris weekend as recommended by the locals - an intimate place of romantic street markets, hidden artistic treasures and Parisian delicacies in a mystery restaurant.

Bingo! This is now a teasing, intruiging summary that works really well for a certain type of traveller. And this is what it is all about - targeting your audience, as you'll never be able to please everybody.

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Meet the author

Chief NutOverly excited co-founder, keen to share the buzz so please get Wikinutting and give us some feedback! I'll be writing about new features as we add them to the site, and a few other topics as well.